and, a year afterwards, the commission was
appointed which now sits, and out of which
comes Sir Fitzroy Kelly, as an independant
member, backed by the commission,
though not representing it, and boldly offers
—if the legislature will but second him—to
deal with the whole subject by groups,
and procure, with the best legal aid, a
complete consolidation of statute law in less than
two years' time. "I declare," said the
chivalrous knight—member for either Suffolk
or La Mancha—at the close of his oration,
promising help to us all; " I declare, deliberately
and unreservedly, that such is the
present state of our law and legislation—so
much has been done, and so many persons
are competent to do all that yet remains to
be done—that I do not know why a single
grievance in the administration of the law of
England should be permitted to continue
unredressed." The honourable house, we fear,
will let him feel the reason why. In the
meantime, he is allowed to begin by laying
on the table two bills; one consolidating the
law of offences against the person, which
diminishes the statute books by one thousand
pages; the other bringing into one act, all
that has been ordained concerning promissory
notes and bills of exchange: thus cancelling
thirteen or fourteen statutes, and getting rid
of some four or five hundred pages of the
interminable statute book.

We have been promised also by the present
government through its solicitor-general,
not merely a measure for the extinction of
the testamentary jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical
courts, but a series of measures having
for object, the utter abolition of all these
tribunals. The public will be very grateful
for such measures—when it gets them; but
there is in the ecclesiastical courts a remarkable
tenacity of life. They were condemned
by a commission twenty years ago; by subsequent
commissions and committees, and they
have been exposed, during the whole time, to
a strong battery of public execration.
Nevertheless, fifteen successive bills have been
introduced for the purpose of removing the
jurisdiction of these rotten and scandalous
establishments to other courts, and all have
failed. There they still remain—three hundred
and seventy-two ecclesiastical courts, in the
whole—with old men, boys, women, friends
of any right reverend patron, picking up rich
crumbs in them. They toss people from one
to another. An executor having taken out
the probate of a will in one court's
jurisdiction, if there be only five pounds' worth
of property found in another jurisdiction,
must take out another probate; after that,
property may be found in another province,
which will require the taking out of a
probate from the other archbishop; and, after
all, no such probate is good for Scotland or
for Ireland. There are pickings here and
pickings there; references to Chancery
where there is real property in question, and
often reference to common law in the form
of trials for issues, to prove facts. Estates
are sometimes swallowed up; nephews, and
nearer or more distant relatives of bishops
and archbishops, receive thousands upon
thousands as the fruit of business so
transacted, or for taking care of wills in offices
like those of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury,
which are not fire-proof, and are situated
next door to a chandler's shop. What need
we say of the property qualification for divorce
—of the procedure in case of scandals in the
church? Why should we wish it to put
scandal down by this jurisdiction, while the
court itself stands before the country as the
chief of scandals? They do without it very
well in Scotland; where, for the last thirty
years, the ecclesiastical courts' jurisdiction
has been transferred to the sheriffs' court.
They do without them everywhere else in
Europe or America. Nevertheless, it is very
doubtful whether we can do without them
here; in other words, whether those who
batten and fatten on such abuses can do
without their inordinate fees and enormous
salaries.

But one touch more is needed to complete
this rough sketch of the union between law
and order on our statute-books and records.
Of the legislation thus conducted no proper
accounts are kept. We have, indeed, some
consolidation of the criminal law, and some
effort to supply annually criminal statistics.
But while in France the whole relation of
crime to the population is set forth by tables
of the results of accusations and decisions,
carefully recorded, we have no returns whatever
from our civil courts; none with regard
to the common law, and none from any of
the courts of equity. Even the returns we
have are almost useless. To save trouble
and expense, columns of information as to
the age of each person and the degree of
his information were omitted; then, to save
a few more halfpence out of sense while
throwing away thousands upon folly, we left
off recording even so much as sex. Of course,
as we never attempted to provide means of
comparing the number of offences with the
number of convictions, or the number of
either with the population of any district in
which they occurred, much information was
not to be got out of the tables even before
curtailments were attempted. Indeed, they
are positively deceptive. We happen to have
discovered, through the complex machinery
of a parliamentary commission, that between
the years eighteen hundred and six and
eighteen hundred and twenty-six the number
of forgeries committed in this country was
diminished by one-half. The criminal returns,
which record—not offences but convictions only
—represent the frequency of the crime as having
within the same years doubled. We have no
record of results at all, even in criminal eases,
that throw light on questions of transportation
penal servitude, or tickets-of- leave. Our